by Ha Jin
Before leaving, Rabe called over Cola, the Russian who knew some Japanese. Young Cola wrote a short official letter for us to take back so we could show it to the soldiers occupying the house where the rice was stored the first thing the next morning.
Cola had grown up in Siberia, where his ancestors had done business with the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese for generations. He had lived in our city for almost a decade, and children called him “the yellow-haired Russian.” He told us that the Japanese had arrested thousands of men suspected of being stragglers and deserters from the Chinese army and had raped hundreds of women in the southern and eastern sections of the city, where streets were strewn with dead bodies. There were also Japanese “fire squads” torching houses and buildings in different areas. Worst of all, some soldiers killed the women they raped to avoid being identified by them to the military police later on; in fact, there were very few policemen in town at the moment. Reports of atrocities within the Safety Zone had come nonstop for a whole day, but Rabe had been unable to contact the top officers of the invading force. We could only hope that the military would soon be able to control the soldiers who were running amok.
“I don’t think those brutes would kill and rape without their officers’ consent,” Holly said.
“The army certainly hasn’t bothered to rein them in,” Cola agreed.
“Who could have imagined such brutalities?” Minnie said.
“What should we do?” Holly asked.
“Nothing I can think of.” Cola shrugged.
When we returned to campus, we saw dozens of women sitting back to back in the front yard, along the cypress hedges. The buildings were already too packed to take in any more people, but more continued flocking to the camp. Agitated by the disappearance of Ban and wanting to pray for him, Minnie said good night to us and headed back to her apartment.
8
IT WAS MILD and sunny the next morning. Watching the refugees in the quad, I was grateful for the warm weather, which felt like October. This would make the uprooted people less miserable on the road or in the wilderness, since they had nothing to protect themselves from the elements. Never had I imagined that our fortified capital could be smashed so easily, like a ceramic vat hit by a mallet. In the north, artillery fire surged and ebbed, rumbling amid smoky and blazing clouds. There was still fighting in the Hsia Gwan area, and the Japanese warships were shelling the remaining Chinese troops and sinking boats and rafts that attempted to cross the river. Around Jinling, rifles crackled from time to time.
Early in the afternoon Holly and I went out to the Drum Tower area, a short walk to the northeast. She had not returned home three nights in a row and was afraid that her house might have been plundered, though she had thumbtacked an American flag to the front door and sealed it with a poster from the U.S. embassy. As we walked along Shanghai Road, many Japanese flags were flying from the houses and buildings, flapping like laundry. A few banners made of white cloth even declared, LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!
“Those people will do anything to save their skin,” Holly grunted.
“They must be terrified,” I said.
“I’m a Chinese citizen too, but I won’t say a good word about the Japanese brutes.”
“You have a foreign face, Holly. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t dare to step off campus without your company.”
We turned into the small alley alongside the eastern border of the Safety Zone. Seven or eight houses on the street had been razed, set on fire after being looted. Holly’s home was among them, and her car was gone too. A young man, bayoneted twice in the chest, lay dead on his side below the brick wall of her yard, his back naked, his hair scorched, and the exposed side of his face eaten by dogs. He looked like a stranger to Holly. “Savages, worse than beasts!” she cursed the soldiers, and broke into tears, wiping her face with the end of her scarf.
“Holly, I’m sorry,” I murmured, and wrapped my arm around her.
The neighborhood was very quiet; you couldn’t hear any noise, not even the tiny chirps made by the sparrows that used to live in many of the roofs. Then a Siamese cat jumped out of a coal shack in the next-door neighbor’s yard and meowed forlornly, as though starved. Brushing away her tears, Holly said, “I guess this is it. Now I have no place to go.”
“You can always stay with us,” I said. That was hardly an invitation, since she was already indispensable to our school. She wasn’t just the only other foreigner on campus but was also, as a musician, needed for the chapel services. Besides, she’d been helping our nurse care for the sick and the women expecting or in labor.
When we returned to the campus, about four hundred men, women, and children were at the front gate, begging Luhai and Miss Lou to let them in. All the women wore white terry cloth over their hair; apparently they were from the countryside. A few old men were sucking on long pipes. I was somewhat surprised, because by now we were known as a camp for only women and children, and most men wouldn’t come to seek refuge anymore.
Minnie said to the villagers, “We accept only women and kids.”
“Please, we can’t go elsewhere,” a thirtyish man begged.
“Most of the other camps take in families. You should try them,” I told him.
“We dare not walk anywhere,” an older man said, donning a skullcap, the type called a melon-rind cap. “If the Japanese devils see us, they’ll kill us and grab our wives and daughters.”
A girl in her mid-teens shuffled over, wearing a pair of bandages on her forehead like two miniature crosses standing together, one taller than the other. “Please let me in, Aunties,” she wailed to Holly and me as we were still standing outside the gate. “I’m the only one left in my family.” She burst into tears.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Some Japs broke into the deserted building where we stayed last night, and they cut down my dad and brothers. Then they stripped my mom and me and started torturing us. I screamed, so they punched me again and again until I lost my voice and blacked out. When I came to, I saw my mom’s body in the room. She couldn’t take it anymore and hit her head on the doorjamb and killed herself.”
Minnie had come out of the gate by now. I realized that the girl had been raped and told her, “You must get treated. I’ll get someone to take you to the University Hospital.”
“I can’t walk anymore. If not for these good-hearted folks, I couldn’t have made it here.”
“Then you can come in,” I said.
After telling a staffer to take the girl to our infirmary, Minnie decided to lead the rest of them to the university camp. Holly offered to go along, but Minnie told her to stay because John Magee had just left and we needed at least one foreigner on campus to deter the soldiers.
Nanjing University was about a fifteen-minute walk from our college, and Minnie led the crowd away with a small U.S. flag in her hand, while I brought up the rear, bearing a Red Cross flag. Passing the closed American embassy, we saw two Japanese soldiers coming from the opposite direction and hee-hawing while prodding a reedy boy ahead of them with rifles. The teenager pushed a barrow that had a large wooden wheel ringed with steel. It was loaded with booty—a stack of dried salt fish, a bundle of potato noodles, a jar of duck eggs still in brine, a wall clock, and a trussed pregnant sheep, still bleating. The soldiers each had about a dozen silver bracelets, watches, and gold rings affixed to their belts. All the women in the procession lowered their heads until the soldiers passed.
When we arrived at the university, we found George Fitch, who had been managing the large camp there with Searle, squatting under a bulky linden, his head in both hands. “Hey, George, what’s the matter?” Minnie asked.
He raised his bony face, his eyes watery and somewhat bloodshot. “The Japanese took away two hundred men just now,” he told her.
“Were they surrendered soldiers?”
“No, many of them were civilians.”
“They just took whoever they wanted?”
“They ord
ered them to undress and checked their shoulders and hands. If there was a mark like something left by a knapsack or a rifle, they took the man. But most of the poor fellows were coolies who had to work with tools and carry stuff around, and of course they had marks on their shoulders and calluses on their hands. The Japanese arrested practically all the young men. There was no way to reason with them. Oh, Minnie, this is horrible, as if we still live in the Dark Ages.”
“What are they going to do to them?”
“Finish them off, I’m sure.”
“I guess they just want to kill to terrify the Chinese.”
“Also to wipe out all the able-bodied males.” He sniveled and blew his nose into a piece of straw paper.
Minnie said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have offered protection to those Chinese soldiers in the first place. Some of them were reluctant to give us their weapons, but we were so foolish that we promised them more than we can deliver.”
“I’ve thought about that too. With firearms they could at least have defended themselves.”
As we were speaking, a group of Japanese soldiers emerged, two of them dragging a scrawny man onto the lawn. I recognized Chang, who used to be a librarian at the university and now worked in the refugee camp as a file clerk. They meant to take him away, but he refused to go with them.
We all stood up to watch. The leader of this group, a lieutenant, ordered a new recruit to stab Chang. The young soldier hesitated, but the officer barked out orders again. The man charged at Chang, whose cotton-padded overcoat was so thick that the bayonet didn’t go through. Realizing they meant to kill him, Minnie and George hustled toward them to intervene. I followed, but the soldiers blocked us. Then, to our astonishment, Chang undid his buttons and dropped his coat on the ground, facing his attacker with just his thin jacket on, his sparse goatee wet with snot. The lieutenant again yelled at the young man, who rushed toward Chang with a wild shriek and stabbed him through. The clerk’s legs buckled, but his eyes were still fixed on his killer. Then he fell, blood pooling around him.
We were so stunned that for a while nobody could move or say a word. Then the troops marched away, and people gathered around Chang, who was breathing his last. “Revenge, revenge,” he mouthed.
He died within a few minutes. I had known this wispy moonfaced librarian by sight and heard he had a fiery temper, but I’d never thought much of him.
Having left the four hundred refugees with George Fitch, Minnie and I headed back. She panted a little as she walked, her gait ponderous but steady.
“I wonder why God let this happen to us Chinese,” I said. “What did we do to deserve this? Why doesn’t God punish those heartless men?” Just that morning I’d heard that a nephew of mine, my cousin’s seventeen-year-old son, had been seized by the Japanese the night before. His parents were distraught but dared not go out and look for him.
“God works in his own ways, hard for us to fathom,” Minnie said, but not convincingly.
Our ancient city, noted for its beauty and cultural splendor, had become hell overnight, as if forsaken by God. I couldn’t stop wondering whether there’d be retribution in store for the ruthless soldiers and their families. No one could brutalize others like this with impunity in the long run, I was sure.
That night, Searle Bates and Plumer Mills slept in our main dormitory and the Arts Building, respectively, while Lewis Smythe kept Luhai company at our gatehouse. Before turning in, the husky Plumer wept and cursed again, his heavy-jawed face scrunched and his hair damp with sweat. He suffered from pain in his chest caused by being hit twice by the Japanese with rifle butts that morning when he had attempted in vain to prevent them from taking thirteen hundred Chinese soldiers out of the police headquarters. A group of American missionaries had disarmed those men and promised them personal safety, but all the poor fellows had been dragged away and executed in the afternoon. Fifty policemen guarding the Safety Zone were also rounded up and shot for letting the Chinese soldiers enter the neutral district. With the three American men in our camp we felt a little more secure. Minnie stayed with Miss Lou in the Practice Hall, which was more than two hundred yards away from the nearest building, tucked in the southeast corner of campus, while I was in charge of the main dormitory. The college’s two policemen still patrolled, but in plainclothes. In addition, an old watchman, lantern in hand, would make rounds throughout the night.
THE NEXT DAY the Japanese went on looting, burning, arresting men, and attacking women in town. Luckily, it was uneventful at Jinling, except that early in the morning a soldier came from the house across from the front gate with four coolies and dropped two sacks of rice with loud thumps. We were pleased that the Japanese had finally let our camp use the grain and didn’t sell the rice back to us. Some soldiers had seized rations from the camp in Magee’s charge and then sold them back to the porridge plant there “at a discount”—wheat flour was two yuan for a fifty-pound bag and rice five yuan for a two-hundred-pound sack.
Since daybreak, more refugees had been coming to Jinling. Although the buildings were all packed, we still accepted the new arrivals, now that they wanted nothing but a place to stay. Most of them just lounged on the lawns or the sports ground. Looking at the refugees around her, Minnie said she was even more convinced that she’d made the right decision to remain behind. I felt the same. Again the Lord’s words rose in my mind: “Thine is the power and the glory.” That seemed to have new meaning to me now, like a promise.
I recited that line, and Minnie nodded solemnly in agreement.
Around midafternoon, Rulian came and reported that some soldiers had gone into the South Hill Residence. Minnie, Big Liu, and I set out at once for that manor, taking the path that cut a diagonal through a bamboo grove. The second we stepped into the building, we heard laughter from the dining room on the left. Three Japanese were sitting at a table drinking apple juice and spooning compote directly from an eight-pound can. Beyond them the door of the pantry was open, the padlock smashed. Minnie went up to them and shouted, “You can’t do this!”
They all stood up and made for the door, holding the juice bottles and two large floral-cloth parcels, seemingly frightened. Once out of the building, they veered east and dashed away, their calves wrapped in leggings.
As I wondered what was inside the two parcels, Minnie said, “They seem like young boys who know they did something wrong.”
“Some of the Japanese are quite young indeed,” Big Liu said, and pushed up his glasses with his knuckle. He looked frazzled; he suffered from insomnia these days and often complained of a headache.
“Do you think they were hungry?” I asked both of them.
“They could be,” he answered.
“I wouldn’t mind if they came just to eat and drink something, but they must let us know in advance,” Minnie said.
Big Liu shook his bushy head and spoke as if to himself. “They really love American party food.”
Minnie chuckled. I liked Big Liu for his sense of humor as well as for his levelheadedness. Sometimes when he said something funny, he himself didn’t realize it—which made it more deadpan. We went upstairs and found the door of a small storage room ajar. Inside, half a dozen suitcases were cut open or unzipped, all ransacked, women’s clothing scattered around. One of the bags belonged to Mrs. Dennison and another to Donna Thayer, a biology teacher who was in Shanghai at the moment. There was no way to find out what had been stolen, so we closed the suitcases and placed them next to four intact ones sitting behind a tall bookshelf loaded with pinkish toilet tissue. There we saw Dr. Wu’s varnished pigskin chest opened and gutted, but again we couldn’t tell what had been taken.
When we were back at the quadrangle, Minnie saw John Magee speaking to Luhai. Suddenly a burst of gunfire came from the southwest, and everybody stopped to listen until the fusillade subsided.
We went up to Magee and Luhai. The reverend said to Minnie, “I just heard that the Panay was sunk by Japanese warplanes.”
“Good Lord,
what about the people on the boat?” she asked.
“Three were killed and more than forty wounded—most of the casualties were sailors.”
“The staff of the embassy is okay?”
“Apparently so. They were rescued.”
My mind began spinning, because Jinling’s portmanteau containing papers, foreign currencies, and Mrs. Dennison’s wedding silver had been aboard the gunboat. I hoped that the trunk was safe and still in the care of the embassy’s staff. If the silverware was lost, Mrs. Dennison might go bonkers. She disliked Minnie, though she was decent to me, mainly because Dr. Wu kept me under her wing. From her first days at Jinling, Minnie must have known that the founding president viewed her as a rival, perhaps because Minnie was bold enough to assume the acting presidency, which no one else dared take, and also because her ability as a leader might pose a threat to the old woman, who demanded loyalty only to herself from the faculty, staff, and even students. Yet Minnie and I agreed that Mrs. Dennison had always regarded Jinling as her home and had dedicated herself to the college. It was this devotion that united the two of them.
ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, more than a company of Japanese troops came to search for Chinese soldiers. Minnie told the commander, a tall man with hollow cheeks, that this camp sheltered only women and children. The head officer, who must have been a colonel and was accompanied by two bodyguards and an adjutant, wouldn’t listen and declared that the Safety Zone Committee had broken its promise to provide sanctuary only for noncombatants, so now the Imperial Army was entitled to weed out all the hostile remnants. True enough—in its original proposal, the committee had claimed that the area would be “kept from the presence of armed men and from the passage of soldiers in any capacity.” But when the letter for the Japanese authorities was composed, none of the committee members had been able to imagine such a turn of events: thousands of Chinese soldiers would come and implore them to save their lives. The foreigners accepted them after collecting their weapons, assuming that the Japanese would follow the common practice in war of treating the capitulated men with basic humanity. Now, in the name of eliminating the former soldiers, the conquerors began to seize whomever they suspected might be a potential fighter.